The city did not celebrate freedom.It panicked.Sirens screamed from three different districts at once. Not warning sirens, but emergency ones, the kind meant for fires, collapsed buildings, and riots. Giant screens that once showed clean system instructions now flickered with error messages and blank static. Traffic lights froze in place, some green forever, some red forever, causing cars to crash at intersections like blind animals.Vincent stood on the roof of a half ruined office building and watched it all unfold.This was the world he had fought for.The system was gone. Its commands, its optimizations, its cold control over every human decision had vanished twelve hours ago. No more daily quests. No more forced efficiency. No more calculated sacrifices.Humans were free.And they did not know what to do with it.A scream rose from the street below. Vincent’s eyes snapped down instantly. A crowd had formed outside a hospital entrance. People shouted, shoved, and cried. He enhan

The first deaths were not dramatic.They did not come with explosions or collapsing towers. They came quietly, in rooms with white walls and flickering lights, where doctors argued and nurses hesitated because no voice told them who to save first.By the time Vincent heard about it, forty seven people were already dead.He stood inside a forgotten metro station, watching emergency footage stream across a cracked screen. The images were shaky, recorded by civilians, raw and unforgiving. A hospital corridor filled with shouting. A man slumped against a wall, oxygen mask dangling uselessly. A woman screaming that her son had been stable until the machines went offline.The caption burned across the screen.SYSTEM VOID CASUALTIES RISE.Vincent turned the screen off.The silence pressed in.He had known this would happen. He had warned them. Still, seeing it felt like a blade sliding between his ribs.“These deaths are not on you,” a voice said from behind him.Vincent did not turn. “Do